Matthew Milliner

In her explosively intelligent book Empress and Handmaid , Sarah Jane Boss contrasts medieval images of the Virgin with contemporary pornography: Whereas the worshipper before the Virgin in Majesty is the servant of the Lord and Lady whose presence the statue conveys, the actors in the pornographic . . . . Continue Reading »

“The most beautiful painting in the world,” Raphael’s Transfiguration, belongs not in a museum but in a liturgical setting, the master of pontifical ceremonies and a scholar of liturgy and sacred art recently declared in the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, speaking of a painting that now sits is the Vatican’s own Pinacoteca Museum… . Continue Reading »

As an undergraduate years ago, those of us in the Wheaton College art crowd piled into a fifteen passenger van for an unusual studio visit. We drove into Chicago to the home/studio of artist Tim Lowly whose work—we were told—is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which in . . . . Continue Reading »

The Gray Lady appears to agree with Micah about Stephen Hawking being something of a bore this time around: The real news about “The Grand Design,” however, isn’t Mr. Hawking’s supposed jettisoning of God . . . The real news about “The Grand Design” is how . . . . Continue Reading »

“Mary Immaculate precedes all others, including obviously Peter himself and the Apostles.”  - John Paul II,  Mulieris Dignitatem “Thou goest to a woman?  Do not forget thy whip!”  - Nietzsche,  Thus Spoke Zarathustra . . . . Continue Reading »

Rusty Reno asked me why we can’t build like Ralph Adams Cram envisioned. The answer to that question, I think, is the architectural equivalent to what Reno himself said about education: “Fearful of living in dreams and falling under the sway of ideologies, we have committed ourselves to . . . . Continue Reading »

I recently came across the following passage from the architect Ralph Adams Cram’s commencement address at the Yale School of Fine Arts (as it was then called), published in The Ministry of Art (1914): The artist is bound and controlled by the laws of his art, but doubly is he bound by his . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1995, when I was a college sophomore (in more ways than one), I drove from New Jersey to California with a med school dropout named Becky, in pursuit of some derivative of Jack Kerouac’s open-road fantasia. Rebelling against the Christianity that was far too normative for our adventurous . . . . Continue Reading »

Protestants in the arts seem to be caught in a holding pattern of vision casting. In his recent book Senses of the Soul, the prominent evangelical theologian William Dyrness suggests that despite a surge of interest in the arts in Protestant intellectual life, there is still a “residual suspicion” regarding the arts in Protestant congregations… . Continue Reading »

James K.A. Smith’s review of Francis Beckwith’s Return to Rome (the best parts of which are the opening paragraphs), might on the surface appear to be a critique of Protestants who convert/revert to Catholicism.  It struck me, however, as an endorsement of just such a move. . . . . Continue Reading »